Albert Einstein vs quantum mechanics and his own mind

It all began in 1922, when Einstein and Bergson met in an unplanned but fateful debate. Einstein had been invited to give a presentation in Paris on his theory of relativity. Time was central to Einstein’s work. It was, however, also the central issue in Bergson’s philosophy. Their conflicting views on the meaning of time set the scholars on collision course.

In the debate, Bergson made it clear he had no problem with the mathematical logic of Einstein’s theory or the data that supported it. But for Bergson, relativity was not a theory that addressed time on its most fundamental, philosophical level. Instead, he claimed, it was theory about clocks and their behavior. Bergson called Einstein out for missing the distinction.

In Bergson’s philosophy, there was something greater to time than just measurements. Time was so central to human experience that fully unpacking it meant going beyond mere accounts of clocks or of even “psychological” perceptions. Instead, time was intimately connected to the bedrock of what it means to experience the world. It was, in some sense, the essence of human being and hence of being itself. – Was Einstein wrong?More.

Sean Carroll’s Preposterous Universe – Michael Egnor – February 13, 2018
Excerpt: Carroll’s universe — a universe without cause — is indeed preposterous. The material universe must be caused, and it cannot be the cause of its own existence. There are clear coherent reasons to infer a Creator, and the only way to deny creation is to deny logic and, ironically, to deny science.https://evolutionnews.org/2018/02/sean-carrolls-preposterous-universe/

Though Einstein was a towering genius, he was at times, like the rest of us, inconsistent in his thinking. His admiration for the historical Christ seems to have been boundless, as attested here, at this link, below :

’17. Einstein’s attitude towards Jesus Christ was expressed in an interview, which the great scientist gave to the American magazine The Saturday Evening Post (26 October 1929):’

“- To what extent are you influenced by Christianity?”

“– As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.”

“– Have you read Emil Ludwig’s book on Jesus?”

“– Emil Ludwig’s Jesus is shallow. Jesus is too colossal for the pen of phrasemongers, however artful. No man can dispose of Christianity with a bon mot.”

– “You accept the historical Jesus?”

“Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.” (Einstein, as cited in Viereck 1929;

Yet, perhaps, in understandable response to the deadly persecution of European Jewry, during WWII, in his dismissal of belief in a personal God, presumably subsequently, he effectively set at nought Jesus’ eschatalogically-oriented teachings, firmly based on the philosophical school of ‘voluntarism’ ; whereby, we know what we wish to know, the will plays a fundamental role in our cognition. The great sin, the unforgivable sin of the scribes and Pharisees, because eternal, was to wilfully deny their knowledge of God, as Christ showed himself to be in their presence by the extraordinary miracles, he wrought.

So, if religious belief were simply a matter of cognition without any dimensions of volitional input (albeit flawed and halting though it is by original sin), then clearly those endowed with a fine worldly intellect would gain heaven, although a heaven where they might expect to meet among the nice guys, no shortage of the worst ogres of human history.

How ironical, therefore that Einstein should have so clearly recognised the divine in Christ and the Gospels, and yet, the emergence of quantum mechanics notwithstanding, failed to countenance the physical reality the latter has revealed, whereby the will of the individual human being is the fundamental substrate of the physical world ; failing to accept, at least initially, that his ‘objective reality’ is ultimately subjective.

Bergson was apparently a very perceptive and brilliant man. Einstein, on the other hand, not so much. Einstein never realized in his lifetime that time does not change. This is why Karl Popper called spacetime, “Einstein’s block universe in which nothing happens.”